Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Ubuntu One file services is shutting down. The news was just posted on the Canonical blog, which explains that among the reasons behind this decision is, as expected, the sustainability:

"[...] the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage. If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make".

The Ubuntu One apps won't be available with Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and the apps available in older Ubuntu versions along with the apps available in the Google Play and Apple Store will be "updated appropriately", which probably means they will only display a message saying that the service was shut down or something similar. And of course, customers that have a paid subscription will get a refund.

This won't affect the Ubuntu One single sing-on service, the Ubuntu One payment service or the U1DB database service.

The Ubuntu One file services will be unavailable starting with 1st of June, 2014 and the content will continue to be available for download until July 31st, when everything will be deleted. Also, starting today, it's no longer be possible to purchase storage or music from the Ubuntu One store.

There's some good news too: the Ubuntu One file services code will be released as open source software "to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform".